Archive for short stories

A while back, I wrote a lot of short stories. At first, I was writing them simply to experiment with voices, styles and genres, and see how far I could push myself. After I’d come up with a few, however, it became clear that something bigger was emerging. The stories began to link thematically, and together became a body of work called The Shuffle.

In The Shuffle, connections are made only to fall apart. Order and randomness fight it out for control. The supernatural rubs up against the banal. Some stories are as meticulous as I can make them, while others are left deliberately loose. One’s nearly as long as a short story can be. Another is just one paragraph. It’s a patchwork quilt, as stitched together by a colour-blind lunatic who may or may not have gotten hold of some dangerous hallucinogens.

This summer, I am presenting short stories from The Shuffle on this blog. There’s a catch, however. Once a story has been up for a week, it gets deleted and replaced by the next one. This is partly so my blog doesn’t get clogged up with short stories, but also hopefully to lend a sense of occasion and urgency to it all.